Yiddish literature

The most important writer of old Yiddish literature was Elijah Levita (known as Elye Bokher) who translated and adapted the chivalric romance of Bevis of Hampton, via its Italian version, Buovo d’Antona.

Nonetheless, Levita altered many features of the story to reflect Judaic elements, though they rest uneasily with the essentially Christian nature of chivalry.

Following the example of other European epics, the Shmuel-Bukh was not simply recited, but sung or chanted to musical accompaniment; its melody was widely known in Jewish communities.

A commentary written for women on the weekly parashot by Rabbi Jacob ben Isaac Ashkenazi in 1616, the Tseno Ureno (צאנה וראינה), remains a ubiquitous book in Yiddish homes to this day.

Previous Kabbalistic themes, accepted without emphasis in Hasidism, entered Eastern European Jewish folklore in tales of reincarnation and possession, and were commonly adapted by later secular Yiddish writers.

The Baal Shem Tov used short, soulful analogies, alluded teachings and encouraging anecdotes in first reaching out to revive the common folk, while parables of other masters were integrated within their classic works of Hasidic thought.

The distinct parables of Nachman of Breslov comprise a complete literary form that stand alone with their own commentary, in Yiddish original and Hebrew translation.

In one example of former Hasidic parable, the Baal Shem Tov explained the mystical meaning of blowing the ram's horn on the New Year: A King sent his son away from the palace to learn new skills.

He saw their roots in ancient Aggadic mystical articulation, by saying that this concealed form was how Kabbalah was taught orally before Shimon bar Yochai explained it, though the Tales are unique in Rabbinic literature.

Modern Yiddish literature is generally dated to the publication in 1864 of Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh's novel Dos kleyne mentshele ("The Little Person").

His extraordinary parody of the picaresque, Kitser masoes Binyomen hashlishi ("The Brief Travels of Benjamin the Third"), published in 1878, was his last great work and provides one of his strongest critiques of Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement.

Secondly, as Dan Miron demonstrates, Abramovitsh brought Yiddish belles lettres firmly into the modern era through the use of rhetorical strategies that allowed his social reform agenda to be expressed at the highest level of literary and artistic achievement.

The outpouring of Yiddish literature in modernist forms that followed Abramovitsh demonstrates how important this development was in giving voice to Jewish aspirations, both social and literary.

Nonetheless, this formulation was propounded by the classic writers themselves, perhaps as a means of investing their fledgling literary culture with a lineage that could stand up to other world literatures they admired.

Simultaneously in Warsaw a group of writers centered around I. L. Peretz took Yiddish to another level of modern experimentation; they included David Pinski, S. Ansky, Sholem Asch and I.M.

A later Warsaw group, “Di Chaliastre” (“The Gang”) included notables such as Israel Joshua Singer, Peretz Hirshbein, Melech Ravitch and Uri Zvi Grinberg (who went on to write most of his work in Hebrew).

Prominent members of Di Yunge included Mani Leib, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, H. Leivick, Zishe Landau [Wikidata] and the prose writers David Ignatoff, Lamed Shapiro and Isaac Raboy.

Glatshteyn was interested in exotic themes, in poems that emphasized the sound of words, and later, as the Holocaust loomed and then took place, in reappropriations of Jewish tradition.

In the Soviet Union, Yiddish literature underwent a dramatic flowering, with such greats as David Bergelson, Der Nister, Peretz Markish and Moyshe Kulbak.

Important Soviet writers who escaped persecution include Moyshe Altman, Ikhil Shraybman, Note Lurie, Eli Schechtman, Shike Driz, Rivke Rubin, Shira Gorshman, and others.

An interesting feature of Yiddish literature in its most active years (1900–1940) is the presence of numerous women writers who were less involved in specific movements or tied to a particular artistic ideology.

Singer, wrote novels and short stories, many of which were sharply critical of gender inequality in traditional Jewish life.

In the developing Yiddish literary scene in Europe and the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century, women writers were regarded by literary critics as a rare phenomenon, at the same time that editors of newspapers and journals, especially those of the socialist and anarchist press, were eager to publish women's work, as a hallmark of modernity and in the hope of boosting circulation; however, a few leading male writers and editors, including Avrom Reyzen and Aaron Glanz-Leyeles, expressed the view that women writers had a particular contribution to make to the emerging American Yiddish literature.

[8] Women writers such as Yente Serdatzky and Fradl Shtok, found a limited degree of recognition for their work but ultimately were out of step with their male literary peers and came to an impasse in their writing careers.

Shtok, at first known for her poetry, especially for being among the first Yiddish poets to write sonnets, garnered disappointing reviews for her collection of short stories (Gezammelte ertseylungen, 1919) that were innovative in the way they incorporated the subjectivity, including erotic desires, of female characters.

The last prewar European-born writers who published or are still publishing in the early 21st century include the Canadian authors Chava Rosenfarb, Simcha Simchovitch (1921–2017) and Grunia Slutzky-Kohn (1928–2020); Israeli writers including Tzvi Ayznman (1920–2015), Aleksander Shpiglblat (1927–2013), Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim, Yitzkhok Luden, Mishe Lev (1917–2013), Yente Mash (1922–2013), Tzvi Kanar (1929–2009), Elisheva Kohen-Tsedek (born 1922) and Lev Berinsky (born 1939); and American poet-songwriter Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman, and poets and prose masters Yonia Fain (1913–2013) and Moyshe Szklar (editor of the Los Angeles Yiddish literary periodical Khezhbn; 1920–2014), as well as the prolific feuilletonist and playwright Miriam Hoffman.

Writers of the "younger" postwar born generation comprising those born in the late 1940s through 1960s (many hailing from the former Soviet Union) include Alexander Belousov (1948–2004), Mikhoel Felsenbaum, Daniel Galay, Moyshe Lemster, Boris Sandler (who edited the Yiddish "Forverts" edition of The Jewish Daily Forward from 1998 to 2016), Velvl Chernin, Zisye Veytsman, Heershadovid Menkes (pen name of Dovid Katz), and Boris Karloff (pen name of Dov-Ber Kerler, editor of "Yerusholaymer Almanakh").

A younger generation of writers who began to come to the fore in the 21st century includes poets Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath, Yermiyahu Ahron Taub and Yoel Matveyev in the US, Yisroel Nekrasov in Saint Petersburg, Haike Beruriah Wiegand in London, Thomas Soxberger in Vienna, and the prose writers Boris Kotlerman in Israel and Gilles Rozier (editor of "Gilgulim") in Paris.

The author known only by the pseudonym Katle Kanye[12] writes blistering satire of current halakhic literature as well as poetry and thoughtful commentary on Hasidic life.

UNESCO's Index Translationum database lists 98 foreign-language books published in Yiddish translation since circa 1979, in a number of countries including Israel, the US, Romania, Germany, and the USSR.